First impressionsA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWthe early years of the Second World War and
the late 1950s, and ranging from John Huston’s
Maltese Falcon (1941) to Orson Welles’s Touch
of Evil (1958). Hollywood fi lm noir, says Michael
Walker in the Introduction to Th e Movie Book
of Film Noir (Studio Vista, 1992), edited by Ian
Cameron, features ‘heroes who are frequently
victims of a hostile world’. Such movies are
characterized by a ‘distinctive and exciting visual
style, an unusual narrative complexity’ and ‘a
generally more critical and subversive view of
American ideology than the norm’.
In the words of E. Ann Kaplan writing in
Women in Film Noir (British Film Institute,
1980, edited by Kaplan), women are ‘presented
as desirable but dangerous to men’. Th ey ‘func-
tion as the obstacle to the male quest. Th e hero’s
success or not depends on the degree to which
he can extricate himself from the woman’s
manipulations’. Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity
(1941), with Fred MacMurray as the (willingly)
manipulated male victim and Barbara Stanwick
as the alluring manipulator, is a classic example
of the genre.
▶Foster Hirsch, Film Noir: Th e Dark Side of the Screen
(Da Capo Press, paperback 1983 and later editions);
James Chapman, ed., Th e New Film History: Sources,
Methods, Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
First Amendment (US, 1791) Th e lynchpin of
American freedom of speech and expression:
‘Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom
of speech, or of the press; or the right of the
people peaceably to assemble, and to petition
the government for a redress of grievances.’
First impressions There is evidence that we
tend to give too much attention to the initial
information we may receive about an individual,
and relatively less to later information that may
be contradictory; that is, we are biased towards
primacy effects (see primacy, the law of).
Evidence also suggests that negative fi rst impres-
sions in particular can be resistant to change.
First impressions can clearly count in situa-
tions where most of the information is received
about a person in a fairly short, discrete period
of time, as in an interview. In this instance there
might be little opportunity for fi rst impressions
to be modifi ed.
In some circumstances – as when a consid-
erable time gap intervenes between sets of
information received about an individual or
when there is regular, close contact with that
individual – fi rst impressions can be modifi ed.
Here the later information received may haveAll forms of cable are limited in terms of the
span of the networks by the number of cable
terminals. In contrast, satellite transmission has
a global reception capacity: the extension of one
is the opportunity of the other – the harnessing
of cable and satellite within the same transmis-
sion systems. See topic guide under media:
technologies.
Fiction values Th ese work with and as news
values. Milly Buonanno in an article ‘News-
values and fi ction-values: news as serial device
and criteria of “fictionworthiness” in Italian
fiction’, published in the European Journal of
Communication, June 1993, argues that the
criteria for modern TV and fi lm fi ction parallel
news values. She cites, for example, the high
social status of the protagonists (the elite
value of news) and the emphasis on proximity,
that which is ‘happening in our own backyards’
(an ethnocentric news value).
Film See anarchist cinema; animation; brit-
ish board of film censors; british film
institute (bfi); british film production
fund; catalyst effect; certification of
films; cinematography, origins; cinéma
vérité; direct cinema; documentary;
double exposure; emotional dynamiza-
tion; film noir; flashback; fly on the
wall; hays office; high-speed photog-
raphy; hollywood; imax; kinetoscope;
kuleshov effect; march of time; mcguffin;
montage; multiple image; musical: film
musical; national film archive; newsreel;
new wave; omnimax; persistence of vision;
rushes; shot; slow motion; soviet mani-
festo, 1928; special effects; synchronous
sound; vamp; video; western; wipe; zoom
lens; zoopraxography.
Film censorship See censorship; certifica-
tion of films.
Film noir Term used by French fi lm critics, nota-
bly Nino Frank, to describe a particular kind of
dark, suspenseful thriller. A classic of the genre
is French director Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève
(1939) – ‘Day Arises’, starring Jean Gabin. We
see the last doomed hours of a man wanted by
the police for murder. He has barred himself in
his attic bedroom in an apartment block. He is
totally surrounded. He has no chance; but then,
Carné makes clear, the man never did have a
chance. At dawn he shoots himself and, as he lies
dying, his alarm clock goes off , reminding him of
his otherwise intolerable life as a worker.
Described as ‘symbolism with a three o’clock in
the morning mood’, fi lm noir gained substantial
currency in the US, generally thriving between